WELCOME > SCHEDULE > EXHIBITIONS > HOW MUCH AIR LUNGS CAN HOLD

BORDERS TEXTILE TOWERHOUSE
THURSDAY 1 – SUNDAY 4 MAY
10:00 – 17:00 / 55′ (looped)

Content warning: contains flashing imagery.

FREE ENTRY

PROGRAMME NOTES
by Michael Pattison

Isabel Barfod’s How Much Air Lungs Can Hold is an affecting and immersive work exploring the relationships between Blackness and swimming. Compiling audio testimony from eleven conversations with Black swimmers in Glasgow and London, Barfod creates a polyvocal tapestry whose power lies not only in the range of sub-themes it encompasses but also in its evocation of lives beyond and between its animated sequences and black-screen interludes.

Recipient of the 2023 Margaret Tait Commission, LUX Scotland’s annual commissioning programme, How Much Air Lungs Can Hold sustains its central query through non-figurative animation and abstract underwater video footage. While the testimonies collated here are grounded in a lived experience that is historical as well as social, the largely non-representational imagery underpins a sense of anonymity-cum-universality. 

Barfod’s formal approach also makes for a generous and inviting experience. The very nature of the imagery here might be pleasant, even deeply transfixing, but the flow and interrelations across distinct imageries is what makes the film so rhythmically involving. Likewise, the artist weaves testimonies together as if they might have unfolded as a single recording. The result is a discursive essay whose apparent open-endedness is emphasised by the seamlessness of the soundtrack’s segues: its rumbles and swooshes, those low-frequency ambiences without beginning or end, which also evoke the subjective interiority of being underwater.

In her deployment of cinematic forms, Barfod provides a kind of formal enclosure to the otherwise indefinable character and texture of water. Just as one interviewee self-consciously stumbles over their wording when trying to lend form to their feelings on swimming, the artist trials myriad methods to delimit and present a vantage point from which others might comprehend or grasp elusive and intangible phenomena. It is through the cinema’s rectangular frame – whose frequently softened edges here again suggest a continuation beyond the camera’s gaze, and all the prejudices coded into that gaze – that water becomes permanent, measurable, reified as a visual thing. In this sense, How Much Air Lungs Can Hold powerfully converts the individual agency of its subjects into something participatory, communal, shared.